Crunch time for Lords and Labour

Crunch time for Lords and Labour

Thursday 27 January 2011 19.05 EST
First published on Thursday 27 January 2011 19.05 EST

I wonder if David Lipsey (Comment, 20 January) still thinks Labour peers are giving the parliamentary voting system and constituencies bill "proper scrutiny"? We are still on the first of three stages and the Lords has now spent over 110 hours on the bill. Labour wanted to use a complex, slow process usually reserved for bills which involve building railway lines through back gardens. If they had succeeded, these simple measures to make sure that there are a roughly equal number of electors in each constituency, and to give people a say on the future of the electoral system, would have taken years to get through. The Lords rightly defeated them then, but it turns out that this time-wasting tactic would foreshadow the current absurd game-playing.

We have heard tedious tales of electric golf carts on Tresco and lengthy laments about the adversity firemen on steam trains in Cumbria once faced. Night after night, the rule has been: if it is irrelevant, it must be said and said again. All this was proved unnecessary and counterproductive when the government accepted a modest amendment to the bill, which I proposed, in just a few minutes. Contrast that with the spectacle of former Welsh Labour MPs taking more than three hours on one amendment and then withdrawing it.

This weekend is crunch time. If the Lords is to maintain its jealously guarded principle of self-regulation, it will have to assert itself over the wrecking tactics of Labour. And if Labour is to retain any credibility over political reform, Ed Miliband must demand that his peers get on with the job they have been placed there to do. It shows just how urgent it is that we get on with reforming the Lords so that our parliament benefits from a modern, democratic second chamber.